Walter: > I've never seen any evidence that punchcards made one a better programmer. > For > sure, one wrote far fewer programs, and infinitely shorter ones, with > punchcards, and so simply lack of experience would make one worse.
This is is right. Nowdays chess gamers across the world are better than time ago just because they have more opportunities to play hard games with very good players (thanks to the web and thanks to very good chess programs). As you say modern computers allow to do much more programming practice, and this makes better programmers. So overall I agree that modern computers/software are much better. On the other hand, I think punchcards were able teach some self-discipline. I have seen programmers (myself too, sometimes) waste 30 minutes of time trying and trying again, when five minutes of focused thinking was probably enough to solve the problem. Somehow you need to learn when it's the right time to step away from the computer and think, and maybe use some paper and pencil too, to invent little graphical abstractions to aid your thinking. Bye, bearophile
